When I use the shadow/highlight effect, my image flickers. I'm using manual settings. Someone suggested changing black clip to 0%, but that did not help. Is there another way to use this effect without flicker?

To clarify, I am not using auto amounts. Temporal smoothing is unavailable for manual control. Any other ideas on what I have to do to keep my footage from flickering? This has happened on several different clips. Thanks! JB

I usually use a combination of Levels and Shadow/Highlight for quick color correction. Shadow/Highlight flickers on most clips, but a few get by with great results. I still haven't found the cause of the flickering. Thanks for the suggestions.

I also use Levels and H&S. I never use the H&S Auto setting, as it will usually lead to "flickering," unless the lighting and exposure are exactly the same for the total Duration of that Clip. I do it with manual settings ONLY.

Yes, actually I did even though I dislike the Auto setting intensely and it did not work.

Uneccesary to call something 'silly' just because its not conventional and if it fixes a problem which (despite your opinion) has not been adressed propperly then who cares how its done?

To make it clear:

TEMPORAL SMOOTHING IS ONLY AVAILIBLE WHEN USING THE AUTO FUNCTION IN THE SHADOWS HIGHLIGHTS EFFECT. This fix applies to people using maunal adjustments of this effect as mentioned in the link you mocked.

Shadows and Highlights is pretty much a big no-go on Auto (feel free to google this topic, quite easy to see I'm not making this up) and if you have a look around you see that people who did indeed have this problem in 'Auto' mode and tried the suggested 'Temporal Shift' found that it does not work for this particular problem.

To those who ran into the same wall, feel free to try this silly solution, wont take you more than 5 minutes to apply (minus rendering time of course:)

Another example why Premiere isn't made properly and fails to be a professional tool, in my opinion.

In 6 years running Premiere and teaching people in schools to use it, even I cannot say it's anything more than a glitchy piece of software that would be incredible if it was half as stable as it made out to be.

I suggest Adobe beta test it more, as it feels like it's beta tested for a week on brand new machines for which every single component, down to the DVD drive is tailored with nothing in mind other than Premiere compatibility. Get real! Why does every competing package run so much better on a wider variety of machines?

I used to be one of the people that kept making excuses for Premiere, thinking it was my fault, and now I just now I need to let go and see how much further competition has come.

(this is all before addressing about 6 other issues ranging from Adobe losing information on my tech support cases, to failing to do callbacks...)

This is absolutely disgusting. I'm getting intense flickering with manual Shadow & Highlight settings on Export. Adobe hasn't done anything to resolve this. It is thus an amateurish piece of toy software. This is happening without any other effects applied to a simple clip but Shadow & Highlight.

I have no idea why you keep linking people over to the help file for the Shadow/Highlight effect. There is absolutely no bit of information there that could lead to any resolution of this issue. It's an example of why people can get so inflamed here; regulars like yourself -- though you are compensated, since your caption is a "Community Professional" -- purport to offer answers (a) without thinking about whether it will actually address the problem; (b) defending Adobe as a starting point; and (c) taking the easiest path of citing already-established generalities.

This is a bug, plain and simple. It dates back years, and hundreds of people have reported it across the Web. [Advice: spend a minute looking.] I have submitted repeated bug reports. Many, many other users have too. This is a simple case of Adobe letting the issue slide. Like a billion others. One tiny example: ever wondered what those Auto Black Levels and Auto White Levels buttons do in the Fast Color Corrector? Absolutely nothing. That's been the case for several years now. Great job, Adobe.

> I have no idea why you keep linking people over to the help file for the
Shadow/Highlight effect. There is absolutely no bit of information
there that could lead to any resolution of this issue.

The page that Jeff pointed to contains information about the Temporal Smoothing control, which is suppsed to prevent flickering. You never said whether you had tried to use that control, even though it was suggested earlier in this thread.

> though you are compensated, since your caption is a "Community Professional"

That is only an acknowledgment by a group here at Adobe that Jeff has shown himself to be a knowledgeable and helpful person---which he is. It is no indication of compensation by Adobe.

> I have no idea why you keep linking people over to the help file for the
Shadow/Highlight effect. There is absolutely no bit of information
there that could lead to any resolution of this issue.

The page that Jeff pointed to contains information about the Temporal Smoothing control, which is suppsed to prevent flickering. You never said whether you had tried to use that control, even though it was suggested earlier in this thread.

> though you are compensated, since your caption is a "Community Professional"

That is only an acknowledgment by a group here at Adobe that Jeff has shown himself to be a knowledgeable and helpful person---which he is. It is no indication of compensation by Adobe.

Seriously, this is why I question the value of these forums altogether. People don't simply read the threads, as is standard in true power user forums all across the Interwebs. If you merely scroll up this short thread, you'll see how obviously Temporal Smoothing is no solution, and 100% irrelevant to the issue being complained about here, which is flickering and banding during both rendering and even paused playback on the timeline in full manual mode. Temporal smoothing is totally unavailable in manual mode, and Jeff knew that.

Since you are an actual Adobe employee, Todd, I have some advice: presume that your customers are pointing out an error that Adobe can fix, instead of beginning with the hope that it's not Adobe's fault. That's good customer service, or in other terms, the only way you'll survive as a business.

I just applied those settings to a DV-AVI Clip (SD), and Rendered that Clip. I could detect no flicker or banding, even with the Program Monitor nearly full screen on my laptop and the Magnification at 150%.

What are the specs. of the Clip, where you observe those issues?

I'll be glad to try with any Source Footage, that I can get my hands on.

I just applied those settings to a DV-AVI Clip (SD), and Rendered that Clip. I could detect no flicker or banding, even with the Program Monitor nearly full screen on my laptop and the Magnification at 150%.

What are the specs. of the Clip, where you observe those issues?

I'll be glad to try with any Source Footage, that I can get my hands on.

Appreciated, and good luck,

Hunt

Thanks for checking it out. Here's another thing to see, a screen grab that shows the Program Monitor view when the time marker is in the clip with the Shadow/Highlight effect enabled using those settings I mentioned earlier. The source clip is a simple MPEG-2 1280x720p 29.97fps file at a moderate bitrate.

The thin band at the top is showing the proper application of the effect; it moves around frame-by-frame (there are no keyframes, cropping, etc., of course) and that is the "flickering" that people are talking about/reporting.

Wow, that IS obvious. I nearly went blind, looking for tiny flickers and banding (at least it did prompt me to clean the laptop's monitor!).

I saw nothing even close.

Am I correct that the problem exists in Exported footage too, and not just in the Program Monitor? If only in the Program Monitor, I would quickly check the video card's installed driver. If in Export, I am at a loss to explain what you show. I will definitely have to defer to Todd, Kevin, or someone else there.

Wow, that IS obvious. I nearly went blind, looking for tiny flickers and banding (at least it did prompt me to clean the laptop's monitor!).

I saw nothing even close.

Am I correct that the problem exists in Exported footage too, and not just in the Program Monitor? If only in the Program Monitor, I would quickly check the video card's installed driver. If in Export, I am at a loss to explain what you show. I will definitely have to defer to Todd, Kevin, or someone else there.

Wow, I started this thread almost a year ago! Anyway, yes, I can confirm that it carries through export. To be clear, the flickering occurs even when all the automatic settings are off. It flickers on manual control. It's really luck of the draw if flickering occurs on a clip or not. Sometimes it works as expected, other times the flickering shows up. Would love to see a solution...

Unfortunately, Levels is broken in CS5. Using the pop-out box, the sliders only adjust the master levels. The RGB levels have no response. You can still adjust these levels in the effects panel, but it's not as convenient.

Too bad old versions of Premiere never seem to get updates, even essential ones, after a new version is released. I just bought CS5 this year, but I'm stuck with broken levels until the next upgrade.

I have exactly the same issue but ONLY with DSLR footage, it's almost as if the rolling shutter affects the flicker...very strange. There are quite a few posts about this but no solution, so i presume it must be a bug.

The quickest way i found to work around with the problem was delete the H/S effect on all the clips and use the Brightness/Contrast tool instead, which seems to work well with exposure issues.

Hello, I came as well into that issue, we are using a high quality highspeed camera with high quality images. Whenever I try to apply shadow & highlight with "Automatic" OFF it always creates dramatic flickering in the preview as well as in the exported material. It doesn't matter which setting.

Is there any further solution than cutting the clip into very small parts?

Since I started this thread two years ago, I still haven't found a solution. I gave up on the shadow/highlight effect and started using a luma curve effect to achieve similar results (with less ease, to be sure). I'd recommend that route.

I'll chime in to and confirm Shadow/Highlight causes a visible and unacceptable flickering on at least half of the shots I apply it to. That is common across AE CS5/6 and PR CS5/6, in both Auto+Temporal Smoothing and full manual modes. I've found flickering across a range of sources (Red, AVCHD, HDSLR, Uncompressed digibeta, MiniDV) at range of resolutions. All clips that flicker were shot on full manual with no adjustment in exposure settings. I can't work out what causes the flickering - I haven't been able to find any pattern amongst the clips that do. It's a real shame because when it works the filter does some truly wonderful things to perceived dynamic range.

Also, the bug/feature request form links to an error page whenever I submit an entry.

I'm afraid to report I still get flickering no matter what, if anything, is sitting below the clip in question - I've had a few instances this morning on the timeline I'm working on. But I'm glad it's working for you Jesse!

I'm here reporting the same bug. For me, what worked was making sure I only had one video element active at a time, so no layers stacked on top of each other. A little annoying but it can be fixed by pre-rendering elements. Not sure if this will work for anyone else.

I'd also like to note that reading this thread made me physically sick. All the old video pros coming in and chipping in their two cents without reading what people wrote before... "easy fix, just enable temporal smoothing." C'mon, pay attention.

I'd also like to note that reading this thread made me physically sick. All the old video pros coming in and chipping in their two cents without reading what people wrote before... "easy fix, just enable temporal smoothing." C'mon, pay attention.

Exactly. It's a big problem here; they'll ban you for mentioning the names of the old veterans with thousands of posts, but it's totally true.

There is none. Make sure there are no video tracks above/below the track you are adding the effect to, turn off auto amounts, and turn black clip/white clip down to 0%... one or all of those things may be required to remove the flicker effect.

For those of you that simply notice the "sky" in your clips flickering when using Shadow/Highlight Adjustment, make sure to set at least the Black Clip and/or White Clip from .01 to 0. This will stop that annoying flicker throughout the entire clip.

If you do a crossfade, with two shadow/hightlight adjusted clips, you get another type of flicker. Rendering without GPU acceleration will solve the problem. Go into Project/Project Settings/General and click software only. Save the file, close out, reopen. It works.

The problem occurs when two clips that both have Shadow/Highlight adjusment with different values are crossfaded. You get this light dark bands of flickering in the crossfade. It looks horrible.

Setting the clipping amounts to 0, as opposed to the default of .01 will help with the clip flickering, but NOT the crossfade flikering. It will not help

Using Opacity keyframes as opposed to the Crossfade Video Transition Effect will not help.

Rendering without GPU acceleration will solve the problem. Another way to solve the problem is to make INTER clips. Render the two clips seperately with all shadow/highlight effects, then replace the clips on your timeline with the rendered clips and THEN crossfade them.

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ALL SHADOW/HIGHLIGHT ADJUSTMENT FLICKERING IS CAUSED BY YOUR GPU CARD AND THIS MAY BE WHY ADOBE DOESNT SEE THE PROBLEM. Im not sure!